Two Weeks To Go & Counting ...



Time is melting ... clearly not working in my favor.

 Oh, my lord ... March has totally kicked my ass.  Totally.  I keep thinking that at some point, work has to slow down enough to let me breathe, but it hasn't.  Sometimes, I like my job, and sometimes it feels like a never-ending onslaught of shit.

Speaking of breathing, I've discovered (or realized?) that I'm obsessed with breath and breathing, at least I am in my fiction.  It is, apparently, one of my favorite descriptive devices in terms of showing the state of mind of my character.  This is not helped by my inability to remember the difference between breath and breathe.  I mean to say that I know the difference, but sometimes when I'm writing my brain has encounters technical difficulties when trying to communicate this to my hands, so my workshop drafts frequently come back with these words circled.  My glaring technial errors only make the abundance of breathing sentences more obvious.

I can't help it, I just think it's a great detail about a character.  Maybe it's just because I think about my own breathing a lot.

The reason I'm mentioning this is that I finished one of the most brutal revisions I've yet endured.  Practically falling asleep at my desk, I am.  This story ... THIS STORY ... is ripping my heart out.  It's so hard.  For me, writing is like method acting, when the writing is really doing its job: I step into the character, and as I'm writing the scene, I acutely endure everything that the character is.  This is emotionally draining, especially when your character's life is falling apart and she find her boss dead from a cocaine overdose on her living room floor.

Totally brutal.

So, this revision?  Took me FIVE DAYS longer than I planned, because I had to stop and take time away from the pages.  It was simply too traumatic emotionally at certain points, and then there's also all the other work I was doing on the piece - moving bits around, slashing parts, completely re-writing other sections that didn't work after I did the first two things. 

Prior to revision: ~8k words
Cut during revisions: ~2k or 3k words
After revision: ~11k words

I am SO going over my thesis page limit.

And so now I am behind on my thesis revision schedule - I am going to have to bust my ass this weekend to get back on track, because did see the title of this post?  TWO WEEKS.  That's right, the final draft of my thesis is due in TWO WEEKS.  My fourth (and final) story hasn't even had its second revision treatment yet (luckily, the fourth story only requires minor revisions), and then I have to start doing micro, line-level editing on my stories.

I think I'm going to be sick.